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This project starts from a simple difficulty: understanding is never produced from a completely neutral or complete description. We reason from limited memories, partial observations, inherited representations and locally shared ways of making sense.
Rather than treating these limitations as defects to be eliminated, the project asks whether they may themselves be part of the conditions under which meaning, knowledge and formal structures emerge.
Understanding rarely starts from a complete description. It can emerge by carrying traces across interruptions, reconstructing what is missing, and discovering what remains stable when the reconstruction changes — without assuming from the beginning a single privileged representation.
This leads to questions about observers, communities, language, memory, computation and mathematics. The project explores how these questions may also change the ways in which representations are constructed, used and understood, rather than assuming in advance a particular language in which they should be expressed.
This connects to questions arising in quantum information, where what can be said about a system may depend essentially on the context in which it is described.
→ A more explicit statement of the motivation
Assemblages
Exploratory constructions, diagrams and fragments of thinking.
These are not definitions or finished results: they preserve intermediate
stabilizations that would normally disappear when a theory becomes formal.
Story
A more narrative way of following the construction and its underlying
questions.
Philosophical access
Questions about understanding, representation, community and the
conditions under which meaning can stabilize.
Mathematical access
First attempts to explore these questions through mathematical structures,
constructions and stabilizations.
Quantum / logical access
First connections with contextuality, computation and synchronization in
quantum information.
Dynamic Automata — Master's thesis by Louis Triouleyre
A concrete formal development connected with the project.
Discrete tools for understanding quantum information
HdR on discrete tools for understanding quantum information.
The distinction between these two groups is intentional: the first documents established academic work, while the second documents the construction of the questions from which further formal developments may emerge.
Some parts of the project are more naturally presented as working documents than as web pages. They are deliberately kept alongside the more structured material.
In this quest for meaning, no single linguistic point of view is taken as privileged: the short machine-made texts follow the tradition, one in French and one in English. The exploratory workshops are mostly in French, with passages in other languages when breathing room is needed.
Dans cette recherche de sens, aucun point de vue linguistique unique n'est pris comme privilégié : les textes courts faits par machine suivent la tradition, l'un en français, l'autre en anglais. Les carnets exploratoires sont surtout en français, avec des passages dans d'autres langues quand il faut respirer.
A 7-page machine-made, humanly checked and discussed project summary
A compact first stabilization of the project.
Un guide de lecture en 6 pages proposant une filtration par déformation du lecteur
Un guide conseil comme pour dire de quoi se départir avant d'entrer
Comprendre Comprendre — premier jet
Ce document contient une première stabilisation du projet
Pragmatiquement-Presque|Anthropomorphismes anthropomorphes
An ongoing working document of reflections and constructions.
Current working manuscript — August 2026.
Presque suffisamment mathematisable
latest developments and ideas with intent towards math — Sept 2026.
The last documents may be added or replaced as the current version of the working notes evolves.
The different pages should not be read as a linear theory. They are different attempts to stabilize related questions. An assemblage may suggest a mathematical construction; a mathematical construction may reveal a limitation of the original intuition; a physical or computational example may in turn reopen the question.
The aim is not to choose once and for all between philosophical, mathematical, computational and physical viewpoints, but to keep translations between them possible — and to remain open to the possibility that the translation itself may change what is being represented.
This is an ongoing, open and deliberately revisable project. Some pages are relatively stable; others are exploratory. They should be read with different expectations.
At present, the project has no single final language. Some constructions are becoming more stable; others remain deliberately open so that their interpretation can still be interrupted and reconsidered.
In particular, the assemblages preserve ideas precisely at the stage where their interpretation is not yet fixed. They are part of the project, not an archive of discarded material.
Understanding — Grenoble
An open and evolving research project. [Website organised by machine]